Hands-on

"Close your eyes, daddy," my daughter exclaimed once I went home last evening. "Close your eyes."

I did so, and when I opened my eyes it was a new house. Vast terra incognita of wit. There had been a lot going on when I went to work. That's the first Monday of Jasmine's term break. My wife took a day off, and I didn't. My child simply created a dream house. You have to try to guess what it is made of. Cut and stick, draw and paste, think and pretend. The new house is all about firing up her imagination.

Shoe boxes, empty toilet paper rolls, handkerchief, and tonnes of creativity. They were good enough to make chairs, kitchen, fridge, potty, bathtub, bedroom and whatever-you-can-dream-of. Make a grid on the cardboard box, draw few circles and they are stoves, draw a square and it's an oven.

When my daughter was cleaning up the craft materials, she found a crumpled sticky tape balled into a small piece. Jasmine was shaking her head. "Sticky and yucky."

"Not really," my wife replied, "That sounds like a bulb."

Within a minute, the idea lighted up like a cartoon's bulb. Jasmine glued the "sticky and yucky" ball on the ceiling of her new house, and told everyone her house is now brightened. She flashed me a megawatt smile that could have powered the whole town for an hour.

Face

For reasons I accept but will never fully understand, all the characters in the Thomas and Friends series won't look the same to toddlers. Ask a preschooler to get aboard the train Thomas, and he will never mistaken that for Bertie or Gordon. Of course, not everyone can do that. I can't.

It seems that there are both genetic and acquired elements in our ability to recognize faces. Oliver Sacks, the author of Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, was born with an inability to parse the visual aspects of a face. Dr. Sacks could not even recognize his own face. On one occassion he turned to the restaurant window and began grooming his beard. In fact - and here's the greatest shock - he wasn't looking at his reflection but another gray-bearded man on the other side of the window.

At the other end of face-blindness spectrum, some guys have incredible and indelible memories of almost every face they have ever seen. I happened to meet one such expert few weeks ago at my hospital. I had my usual morning round with my teammates, going through the story and laboratory results of one new patient. He listened carefully, gazed at me, and let me examine him. Then he leaned back and seemed to take a deep breath. "Doctor, were you working in this hospital fifteen years ago?" This was followed by everyone's curious look on me. "It's my photographic memory," he confirmed, and went on to tell us he was a police. There was little chance of anyone being seen by him and forgotten. I was completely floored.

"We have met before," he answered, and reminded me that his wife had been one of my patients too, back in 1997. By late afternoon, I asked him quietly the name of his wife. The name didn't ring a bell.

She died in the same year, I was told, but the family appreciated my taking care of her. I went to the computer and run through the list of patients bearing the same name. It didn't take me long to find the record of my patient's wife.

Over the next fifteen seconds or so I kept my eyes closed, and tried to retrieve the face of his wife. I couldn't. Her face had been erased. I went on to recall details of her illness. Then I started to notice that I had professional memory of her condition in forsenic detail. I have no idea what my patient looked like after fifteen years, but I remember most of her medical problems, as detailed as the finding of purple Howell-Jolly bodies in her blood.

U-Bend

I am writing these words one day after a meeting at my daughter's school. That's a meeting with the principal and school board to discuss the future structure of the kindergarten and primary school.

There have been efforts to expand the school. As parents, many of us say we want a secondary school for our children.

Reality check: There will be financial implication in building a new school, and it might not be easy to find a school which is closing down. Now that a secondary school is not guaranteed, the number of classes will dwindle. That means having one class in the first grade instead of two. The principal said that if we don't want to turn down students after kindergarten we would have to fill more students within one class in the primary school. How many of us want our children to have a place in the same primary school? Nearly all hands go up. How many of us want a bigger class?

Few hands.

But there is not much we can do about the size of the class. Which brings us, somewhat uncomfortably, to the question of whether a bigger class size translates into worse result.

This is not the way it is. As Malcolm Gladwell put it (in his recent book David and Goliath), we are operating in a U-shaped world. That means we should not expect a straight line when we plot the academic achievement against the class size. Why should there be a U-curve relationship between the number of children in a classroom and academic performance? As is too often the case in education, quality is more important than quantity. Yup, smaller class implies fewer children to follow, more time to know the children, and fewer papers to grade. But the trade-off for a smaller and smaller class is less interactions between students. Well, it's chaos when the classroom is too crowded, but it's not a good choice when the classroom is too silent. Small class size makes teaching easier until a certain point - the point when "diminishing marginal returns" sets in. Human nature simply dictates the critical point. Here's an example. You give me two minutes to write this blog, and I will end up with mistakes and rubbish. Let me have another half hour, and I'll write better. What about giving me another week? Would you expect me to spend the whole week writing this paragraph?

Camping

We tried something new this weekend with Jasmine. We decided to have a camping trip, a feat we had not accomplished since our daughter had been born.

It was great to be back in the wild and enjoy the addictive feeling of freedom that comes with camping. We were proud to see how quickly we put up the tent. The first day of camping experience had kept Jasmine occupied. With few toys and limited access to the mobile phone, my daughter learned to find fun in everything around. Sand, sea shells, sticks were good enough to create an ice-cream. She even picked leaves to cover the cow dung, and a swell of laughter - hers - followed. Having spent a day of imaginative games, she got tired.

The clock's hour hand had long crossed eight, and my daughter felt her eyelids grow heavy. Everything turned dark in the countryside after the sun went down. I imagined that Jasmine would be snoring soon after snuggling down happily inside the tent. What I hadn't realised was that she might not be ready for the darkness in the wild.

"I want to go home," she whispered first and then repeated the sentence aloud. Tears followed. So we were telling her it's too late to catch the boat home, and I was starting to wonder if it was all worth it.

I'd tried to calm her down a couple times, but she was not having it, not one bit, not with the darkness outside her comfort zone, the cold outdoor camp, and her longing for sweet bedroom at home. We walked around and watched hundreds of stars lighting up the sky. She became fascinated, got quiet, listened, and forgot about the darkness. Then, half an hour later, when it was dinner time, she asked to count the stars with us. So we went ahead, amazed at the starry night.

"Good enough, and let's go home," Jasmine told me after we'd said good night to the stars.

"Go home? Now?"

"I mean the tent," she quipped with a smile.

Habit

Sure, people always fall prey to everyday habits and routines. Most of us (and I must confess I count myself among them) keep doing the same thing - like looking too much at the mobile phone. It's the first object I reach for in the morning and the last thing I look at before bed.

It all seems so natural. Thing is, if you've read Charles DuHigg's The Power of Habit, there's a good chance you'll understand how a habit - like a parasite, only much worse - enters our brain and lives there.

The basic rule of habit is straightforward. It's a habit loop with three stages: the cue, which is a trigger in the first place; the routine, which is the behaviour itself; the reward, at the end, to satisfy the brain and guarantee that the loop is worth replicating. Straightforward idea, really.

To show you how a habit kicks in, let's think about the urinal in public toilets. For more than a century, the urinal has been one of the dirtiest areas. What would you do if you happened to be given the task of latrine cleaning? I learned the trick from a story at Schiphol, Amsterdam's international airport. Imagine, for a moment, holding your breath in front of the urinals and getting mad about the spillage (which is a tactful term to describe the amount of urine that hits the walls and floors). Can we shape the behaviour and habit of those visitors of the toilet? Remember the habit loop? Not many do, except a smart guy Jos Van Bedoff. Van Bedoff managed to change the habit of thousands of men at Schiphol, because he exploited the habit loop. Guess what is the cue that he invented?

A fake but life-sized fly etched into the white porcelain wall of each urinal.

The rest is easy to understand. Et voilà! Spillage was cut by a whopping 80 percent.

Volcano

Everyone can get angry. Eight till eighty. Get along with anyone long enough and you will come across a volcanic moment. 

One of my exemplary colleagues never loses patience with his patients, and for heaven's sake, exploded few days ago at a wedding banquet. That's after the waitress poured the salad dish on his girlfriend's dress. You could cook a six-pack of eggs next to his burning face. Quite right so? 

However, many of his friends find it unbelievable as if that's the sight of a volcano in Hong Kong instead of Indonesia. This, I fear, is as unusual as a saint using obscene language in their minds. That raises a point worth clarifying: that showing anger is not a sin.

As I learn to teach my daughter to feel okay with anger, I get to appreciate that anger is indeed one toolkit of emotion - and an essential energy source. And just to stretch the mystery of anger a little bit further, it's a birthright. 

There's a line from Aristotle that's an old favourite of mine: "to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way."

Echoed

No argument: growing up in impoverished Afghanistan town is never easy.

Ten minutes in the desert and already the feet felt raw. How do the kids walk all day without shoes, I wondered as I read the novel And the Mountains Echoed by the acclaimed author Khaled Hosseini (whose novels The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns have sold a combined 38 million copies worldwide). The first few chapters of his latest novel drew me to the touching tale of a brother and sister.

The brother heard about another boy whose family owned a peacock. It would be hard to think of a better gift than a peacock feather with a beautiful large eye at the tip. The ten-year-old brother wished he could bring the gift to his sister. He negotiated. In a last-ditch effort, he traded his shoes for the iridescent green peacock feather.

By the time he made his way home shoeless, his heels had split open and left bloody smudges on the ground. If you'll let me, I'd like to tell you a little bit about his soles: thorns and splinters had burrowed into every cell of his skin. You could hear the brother's groan with every step, and possibly feel the barbs of pain shooting through his feet.

Imagine going to work or school barefoot and finding no path other than the bumpy road. You just keep looking at each step. Because if you don't learn to do this, you'll learn a painful lesson. Keep going. About an hour passes, and you're still only half way through. I had such chance to find out how it goes yesterday. Let me explain.

That's a charity walk to raise money for poor children in countries like Bangladesh and Zimbabwe. That's meaningful, right? And probably the most important thing is that we have to walk without socks or shoes. I brought my daughter to walk with us. She might laugh at the somewhat funny way of walking. And then it turns out that it isn't that funny. Of course, there will always be a flickering moment of insight, like learning to feel sorry for the poor children without shoes - which is, needless to say, how I wish my daughter could learn.